2013 – Page 3 – Unsuitable Blog and HappenStance News

WHAT GOES WRONG WITH POEMS (II)

The force that through the green fuse drives the poem . . . doesn’t.

Real, true poems have a surge of energy from start to finish, don’t they? It’s hard to be absolute about such things. But I think it’s true.

Sometimes it’s dead obvious from line one. Here’s W H Davies in ‘The Power of Silence’:

And will she never hold her tongue,
About that feather in her hat

Suddenly you’re right in there, and it’s a situation, and the fuse is lit. And after that the syntax is important and the rhythm and the meaning – the whole thing is driven and the reader is compelled onwards. That feeling of compulsion is something I need and look for. I know I must be looking for it because I know when I haven’t found it.

Because here’s my situation. I’ve just finished week two of the submissions month: 43 brown envelopes (ok, some were white) so far, which is at least 516 poems. Twenty-six women, 17 men. Twenty-four of the 43 were HappenStance subscribers, which is heart-warming. (Nearly all the packets falling through the letterbox were by women to start with, but now most are male.)

I’ve read a handful of remarkable pieces, quite a number of good ones, and lots that were good of their kind. These are the ones I feel most guilty about because I end up being so mean to the author. But how do you identify that sense that the poem is well-made – even laudable – but doesn’t quite lift off? Nobody wants to be damned with faint praise. But still there is a point at which a good poet needs a nudge. Like playing a computer game, it’s the business of pushing on to the next level.

I am aware I am talking in metaphors. It’s so hard to talk any other way about the process of writing.

I have also come across loads of poems that have poems in them.

Meaning . . . precisely what?

It’s that feeling you get when you come to a fabulous stanza or set of lines and yet – most of the poem is . . . just lines, or groups of well-meaning words. Though perhaps there’s another wonderful bit at the end, or just before the end.

It’s easier to say what doesn’t work than to explain what does. Except sometimes making it work is simpler than people think, and it is complexity and literariness that gets in the way.

Often I find myseIf penciling a little arrow and saying, ‘I think the poem starts here.’ By which I mean, this is the point from which I feel compelled. It’s the point where, for me, the fuse is lit, and that means, almost certainly, it wasn’t ignited in line one.

Tom Duddy, whose second (posthumous) collection HappenStance will publish later this year, once told me a poem had to capture his attention in the first four lines.

Or perhaps it wasn’t four. Perhaps it was within the first twenty words. Or perhaps I can’t remember precisely what he said and am wilfully recreating the memory. But I am sure he spoke about our shared expectation that poetry (Poetry), that finest form of writing, should do something dynamic early on.

I don’t think high drama is required. Sometimes it’s just an easy route in, a subtle way of involving the reader in a situation or a mood. The syntax (by which I mean the grammatical structure of the opening statement or sentence) is usually crucial. If it’s slightly confusing, or the line break is fiendish, the fuse splutters.

Often the old journalistic trick of cutting the first paragraph (in poetry, it’s the first stanza or two) accomplishes wonders. Or ending before people expect you to.

WHAT GOES WRONG WITH POEMS (1)

Week one of the July submissions window is over already.

I’ve read and returned 30 manuscripts. More will arrive tomorrow, and some are still sitting in my box.

So far the standard has been high. This both delights and alarms me: I can’t meet the demand. I can only work with a tiny number of these poets to make a publication.

However, many of them will find other routes to readers. Some, I am sure, will go on to win one of the pamphlet competitions.

I look for poems that connect instantly. I want the magical thing, the almost-impossible-to-describe visceral recognition, an intuitive grasp of meaning even where the surface is puzzling or obscure.

Sometimes, there’s a snag that interrupts the connection, a little thing easily fixed. (It’s easier to describe flaws in poems than put them right.)

One of these is the habit of opening a poem ‘I remember’. Sometimes it’s not the first line – but it finds its way in there, and often it’s repeated. (One poet this week wrote ‘I’ve not forgotten’ – much stronger.)

Most poems are, I think, made from memories. If they’re also written in the first person, the reader assumes the memory belongs to the poet.

So you can present the memory without ‘I remember’. It’s the difference between

I remember the sweet scent of honeysuckle in the rain

and

The scent of honeysuckle in the rain was sweet

Of course, the phrase ‘I remember’ evokes a number of older poems that we also remember (I remember ‘I remember’), as well that seductive emotion: nostalgia. The sound of the word ‘remember’ is as cosy as an old armchair.

For additional protection from the infection of ‘I remember’, vaccinate yourself by writing an instant ‘I remember’ poem with an online generator.

Then why not revisit the famous ‘remember’ poems which are subconsciously leading you to echo them?

For example, there’s good old Thomas Hood’s I remember, I remember? It’s a sweet but sentimental piece and I would probably weep over it after my third glass of wine.

Or Hilaire Belloc’s Tarantella – not at all sentimental: ‘Do you remember an Inn, Miranda, Do you remember an Inn?’ (While writing this blog I found the most extraordinary YouTube clip of Belloc singing this! I had no idea this existed, or that Belloc could sing. Some would say, of course, that he couldn’t.)

And of course, mistress of the ultimate emotive pang, there’s Christina Rossetti with the ‘funeral poem’: ‘Remember me when I am gone away’. Note that she goes for the imperative. Rossetti was no wimp.

The two words ‘I remember’ instantly summon love and loss, with the emphasis on the latter. But after using them to get the poem going, swiftly excise the phrase. Show no mercy. ‘I remember’ is scaffolding for a building that will stand stronger without it.

TOO MANY POETS, BUT NIL DESPERANDUM!

An extraordinary week (for me) concluded with The Poet’s Compass yesterday at the CCA in Glasgow.

It was a splendid day with a buzz about it. The fiendish organization and planning carried out by Philippa Johnston paid off. All sorts of interesting and information and ideas were in the air. It was as friendly as StAnza, with people hobnobbing in corners, conspiring over coffee, and revelling in the wonderful, entirely vegetarian lunch.

There was quite a bit about spoken word which, to quiet poetry-in-the-backroom people, can sound scary. But Ali Moloney, Harry Giles (‘all poets should know their way round hip-hop’) and Michael Pedersen could not have been more welcoming and enthused (Michael’s first collection, endorsed by Stephen Fry, is imminent). Open mike sessions began to sound inviting, even for fogeys. Fun was mentioned more than once.

Jennifer Williams did a wonderful job of co-ordinating and linking all platform events with imperturbable delight. Herself a Shearsman author (though she now looks nothing like her author photo), she was a part of the incredible range of poetry backgrounds and experience. There was a feeling of sharing and breaking down boundaries.

Elspeth Murray was charismatic with luggage labels, having fun with poetry in all sorts of ways without even hankering after book publication! Wonderful. It was a day of alternatives. Chris McCabe was there from the Poetry Library in the Southbank: great to put a face to a name, and even hear him talking about Chrissy Williams – yeay! HappenStance poet! – as an example of how to do things differently.

Kona McPhee dealt with the pain: ‘ambition for success is the way you make yourself pay for the gift of creativity . . . Ambition isn’t about the gap; it’s about the void.’ A book, she said, (her third has just been published) doesn’t make the need for validation go away. I read What Long Miles in the train on the way back, on the long way home, and the beautiful, heart-breaking little poem ‘dog’ is still with me, as is ‘How to Fail’.

How shall I tell thee? So many ways. . . Gerry Cambridge was inspiring on the prospect of self-publication and doing it well. He was also extremely funny about the editorial side of things with The Dark Horse.

Main speaker was Neil Astley who somehow tackled the current state of poetry publishing without being depressing. How did he do that? The day was so buoyant that reality simply floated up there unthreateningly. It is thirty-five years since he started Bloodaxe. Good grief! Thirty-five!

He spoke about the huge volume of submissions, the tiny number of Bloodaxe new-author publications per year (between one and three), the reasons why 95% of those submissions stood no chance. There were four reasons, he said:

The ‘poet’ does not read poetry (or is just possibly a member of a group who only read each other).
The ‘premature ejaculation’ phenomenon i.e. doing it all too eagerly and too soon, with little experience in the field, or insufficient track record of magazine publication.
The poet had chosen the wrong publisher/editor/ or imprint for what he or she wanted to do. (Research the imprint! Read what it says on the website. Read the books!)
The poet needs help, not publication.

A really good tip was this: send six of your best poems with a covering letter briefly listing previous credits and sounding out the publisher (they are almost all men still – he mentioned Michael Schmidt, John Lucas, Andy Croft, Mike Mackmin, Charles Boyle and Peter Sansom – only Amy Wack and Jane Commane were there for the wimmin, though the remarkable Robyn Marsack did get a mention as one of the Carcanet Oxford Poets editors). Neil said he was more likely a) to read and b) to turn the enquiry round quickly if it was brief and to the point.

He reminded us that only 1 in 10 of any books was ‘successful’, that 0.6% of all book sales are poetry, and that ‘poetry readers are notoriously resistant to e-books’ – so far.

And he described what he has always looked for and continues to value: a poet who nurtures the talent before taking it out into the world. He spoke of the way the ‘individual voice can only be achieved in private’ though it is moving towards a public self. He spoke of the way a set of good poems is not enough. There are too many poets for the opportunities, too many sets of good poems. What is required is a voice ‘unlike anyone else’s’, a set of poems ‘consistently strong’ and not a collection that could be a ‘one-trick horse’ (which, by the way, suddenly struck me as a great collection title), but a talent that promises something that can be sustained, a writer who can go on to complete ‘even stronger second and third collections’.

Already I see in my paragraph above that the words look chilly and easily criticized. But it was a warm speech from a man beleaguered by the logjam, but also a central part of keeping it electrically alive. He was cheerful and funny.

And then there was me being HappenStance and about to go into the July month which is the submissions period. When I got home two more envelopes were already waiting. And the awful thing is that I, too, am now part of the impossible poetry logjam, because really I can only do a few publications a year, and I too have more submissions from poets worthy of publication than I can possibly take forward.

However, I can and do offer other things. I can, for example, give feedback. It is only one person’s point of view, of course, but still a fairly detailed response is worth something, it is a huge investment of time on this side of the equation, and it’s something you don’t get from competition entries. I often make suggestions, and these sometimes include self-publication, co-operative developments or alternative formats.

Neil Astley said ‘poetry only reaches readers through enlightened subsidy’.

I immediately thought ‘that’s not necessarily true’. HappenStance has no public funding. It has to wash its face through sales.

But ‘enlightened subsidy’ manifests in many ways. With HappenStance, the financial support is in the subscribers who choose to support the press by buying pamphlets, following the story of the press, engaging in dialogue, and giving feedback on the publications – they are the people who make this possible. A year ago there were about 250. Now it’s more like 350. This means that a new pamphlet publication usually finds at least 60 readers amongst the subscribers alone. 60 copies may not sound like much in terms of Harry Potter, but it makes a HUGE difference in terms of keeping things going, and it’s one reason why Fiona Moore’s recent pamphlet, The Only Reason for Time, has already sold out of its initial print run of 280 copies (the author still has a few).

Most people who send in poetry submissions to HappenStance from the UK either subscribe before they send, or after. None of the cash benefits accrued could be realistically be described as ‘profit’, but in fact almost everything depends on the subscriber scheme. The HappenStance subscribers are marvellous readers. Writing is a two-way process, and reading is a creative act.

Watch for more on the current state of po over the next few weeks, though there may be asides on the grandbaby (another startling event here this week), and other poetry plans now I have officially ceased to be a college teacher after 25 years in harness. I was awarded ‘voluntary severance’, which means they pay you not to work for a whole year, so long as you promise not to go back.

No problem. Off to read some poetry now.

ARE YOUR POEMS RANK AMATEURS, OR TRUE PROFESSIONALS?

It’s a trouble-making question.

And no, I don’t look at it in that way. But others do — and it is so very tempting to find some way of ruling on what makes a good (or even ‘great’) poem. Michael Dalvean in ‘Ranking Contemporary American Poems’ (thanks to Tim Love for sending the link) claims ‘By using computational linguistics it is possible to objectively identify the characteristics of professional poems and amateur poems’.

What he says sounds perfectly reasonable: ‘Placing poems on a continuum that is based on the extent to which poems possess the craftsmanship of a professional may be a step towards explaining why some poets are “greater” than others’.

Dalvean refers to two previous studies using computational linguistics to crack poetry. The first of these (Forsythe, 2000) compared the features of regularly anthologised poems with ‘obscure’ (un-anthologised) ones. It concluded that:

successful poems had fewer syllables per word in their first lines and were more likely to have an initial line consisting of monosyllables. It was also found that successful poems had a lower number of letters per word, used more common words, and had simpler syntax. Thus, contrary to what we might expect, the more successful poems used simpler language. In essence, poems that use language that is simple and direct are more likely to be reproduced in anthologies.

A second study, ‘Kao and Jurafsky, 2012) compared 100 poems from a reputable anthology with another 100 from (oh dear) www.amateurwriting.com found that ‘professional poets used words that were more concrete’ and the amateurs ‘ more likely to use perfect rhymes . . . more alliteration and more emotional words . . . .’ The ‘professional poets’ also used more words. Period. Not cleverer words – a wider variety of simple ones.

Dalvean has built on these studies but added ‘a broader range of linguistic variables’, namely 68 linguistic variables derived from Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (Pennebaker, Francis, & Booth, 2001) and 32 psycholinguistic variables from the Paivio, Yuille and Madigan (1968) word norms’.

It gets complicated here (you can read the original paper if you follow the link above). The bit that grabbed me was the idea that there might be an

algorithm that is able to correctly classify poems as professional/amateur with an accuracy of 80% using linguistic variables. There are several applications for such an algorithm. For example, a publisher who needs a quick way of sorting through the voluminous submissions received on a weekly basis could first select a filtered list by running poems though such an algorithm.

Yessss! Though not yet July (my reading window) the early can’t-waiters have begun to trickle through the box. Is this the answer? There is a machine to put the poems through. It might be possible not to read them at all, but just to process them for value, like holding a £20 note up to the light to check it’s not a forgery.

Here is the link http://www.poetryassessor.com/poetry/. Go here to test your own poems. Alas, I put some of mine through the mangle (of course). Most of them were horribly amateur but yours might fare better.

Meanwhile, back to peeling (see below). Others peel after sitting outside in the sunshine. I peel inside (peeling stamps off envelopes) ready for an onslaught of poems in July, some of which will forget to include SAEs. The Royal Mail continues to assist, though not on purpose. . . .

Next Saturday’s NAWE event at CCA in Glasgow promises to help poets get onto the ‘professional’ spectrum, though in a more strategic manner. I’m not sure whether it’s fully booked yet, but if in Scotland, worth a look. I will be there.

WHY ANON IS BEST

Anon is, with considerable justification, the most famous of them all. But many names cling to anonymous coat-tails.

Besides, some of the best bits of literature find their way to us through anthologies, and many of us learned to like poetry that way. I had Walter de la Mare’s Come Hither (first published in 1923) and the Oxford Book of Poetry for Children, edited by Edward Blishen. Young readers aren’t fussy about who wrote what. They just lap up the story, the juiciest bits of language and (if there are any) the illustrations.

The ballad of Sir Patrick Spens existed long before anyone wrote it down but I first met it in Come Hither, and so, without knowing it, I was reading the earliest collected version, or more or less (de la Mare has modified the spelling slightly). De la Mare selected the version that first popped up in 1765 in volume 1 of the Reliques assembled by Thomas Percy, chaplain to George III and later Bishop of Dromore in County Down. Percy said his text was ‘given from two MS copies transmitted from Scotland’. The provenance of the manuscripts to which he refers is lost in history.

However, de la Mare in his notes (which I would certainly not have read in my tender years) says he has chosen this one (he doesn’t say it is Percy’s, but it is) in preference to Walter Scott’s ‘better known’ version collected in Minstrelsy of the Scottish Borders (1802). Why? He implies that Scott tampered: ‘The longer version of the ballad into which the genius of Sir Walter Scott wove a few new stanzas is the better known. But his was perilous work. Indeed, the secret of the art of this naked and lovely poetry seems nowadays to be lost: the marvel is how much it tells by means of the little it says.’ He goes on to quote five variants of one stanza just to show how unreliable any concept of the ‘original’ might be.

The celebrated American collector, Francis Child, between 1882 and 1898 published five volumes of English and Scottish Ballads and has much of interest to say about the background to Sir Patrick Spens in volume III. He discusses, for example, the historical events to which the ballad may refer, when in 1281

‘Margaret, the daughter of Alexander III, was . . . betrothed to Eric, prince of Norway. The bride was conducted to her husband by a splendid convoy of knights and nobles, and in the month of August was crowned queen. In returning from the celebration of the nuptials, many of the Scottish escort were lost at sea, and among those who perished was Sir Patrick Spence, we are to suppose.

It is in conformity with this view of the origin of the ballad, (the suggestion of Motherwell,) that in Buchan’s version the object of the voyage is said to be to take the king’s daughter, now ‘a chosen queen’, to Norway. In Scott’s edition, on the other hand, Sir Patrick is deputed to bring home the king of Norway’s daughter.

To explain this circumstance in the story, Sir Walter is forced to suppose that an unsuccessful and unrecorded embassy was sent, when the death of Alexander III had left the Scottish throne vacant, to bring the only daughter of Eric and Margaret, styled by historians the Maid of Norway, to the kingdom of which, after her grandfather’s demise, she became the heir.

That such an embassy, attended with so disastrous consequences to the distinguished persons who would compose it, should be entirely unnoticed by the chroniclers is, to say the least, exceedingly improbable.’

So much for Scott’s creative role, then, which Child clearly seems to see as more than proper interference. But there’s more. Child goes on to discuss another entertaining possibility:

‘Then, ‘an ingenious friend’ having remarked to Percy that some of the phrases of ‘Hardyknute’ [in the Reliques ‘Hardyknute’ is ascribed to Elizabeth, Lady Wardlaw] seemed to have been borrowed from ‘Sir Patrick Spence’ and other old Scottish songs, this observation, combined with the fact that the localities of Dunfermline and Aberdour are in the neighborhood of Sir Henry Wardlaw’s estate, leads to a conjecture that Lady Wardlaw may have been the author of ‘Sir Patrick Spence,’ as she is known to have been of ‘Hardyknute’.

It could never be deemed fair to argue from those resemblances which give plausibility to a counterfeit to the spuriousness of the original, but in fact there is no resemblance in the two pieces. ‘Hardyknute’ is recognized at once by an ordinary critic to be a modern production, and is, notwithstanding the praise it has received, a tame and tiresome one besides.

‘Sir Patrick Spence’, on the other hand, if not ancient, has been always accepted as such by the most skilful judges, and is a solitary instance of a successful imitation, in manner and spirit, of the best specimens of authentic minstrelsy.’

‘Tame and tiresome’ – poor Lady Wardlaw! If Sir Patrick was an imitation it was written by someone much better at fabricating the ancient style apparently.

Who was the original perpetrator of The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens, then? And does it matter? The glory of collecting the old poems was extremely attractive. Bishop Percy, in the 1760s was not alone in being engrossed by the old ballads. He had hit a rich seam and it made him famous. His Reliques were celebrated across Europe where an interest in old songs and lyrics was spreading like wildfire, dramatically influencing contemporary poets (the influence is with us yet). There was something raw about the ballads, a sense of going back to the source.

But where anon is concerned, a particular kind of artistic license can easily creep in. One is only charged with plagiarism where there is a known author to plagiarise. As the ballads were collected, they were manipulated to a lesser (sometimes just the spelling) or greater degree.

In some cases, complete spoofs seem to have been accomplished. For example, the Scottish poet James Macpherson claimed to have been doing something similar to Percy. He was going about collecting bits of ancient verse and making them respectable. He could read and understand the ancient Gaelic and it was to his advantage that few scholars could do the same. In 1760 he published Fragments of ancient poetry, collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and translated from the Gaelic or Erse language. But this was nothing to his ‘discovery’ in 1761 of an epic about the Irish hero ‘Fingal’, an alleged translation from original writings by Ossian or Oisín, son of Finn or Fionn mac Cumhaill, (Finn McCool), a mythical figure from Irish, Scots and Manx mythology. This officially became Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem in Six Books, together with Several Other Poems composed by Ossian, the Son of Fingal, translated from the Gaelic Language.

Today it is generally agreed that Fingal’s ancient epic poem owes more to Macpherson than any other writer, though most are not as rude about Macpherson as Samuel Johnson who said he was ‘a mountebank, a liar, and a fraud, and that the poems were forgeries’. At the time, though, people across Europe adored the idea of this ancient epic, lost in the mirk and mists of time and now resurrected for their benefit. Napoleon Bonaparte loved Ossian. The work was translated into French, German, Danish, Swedish, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Polish, Czech and Hungarian. Without Ossian, Mendelssohn’s Fingal’s Cave would not have existed. It raised Scotland’s international status in such a way that Braveheart pales into insignificance.

But back to Sir Patrick Spens which, in a small way, may be equally suspect. I don’t care. I liked it from the start. Even at the age of eight (children are far less daunted by such things than adults) I liked the weird spelling. I liked the fact that the wine was ‘blude-reid’ (it may be a cliché but it also foreshadows the doom of Sir P, and the Scots spelling is delicious). I liked the ballad even more when, as an adult, I moved to Fife and learned that Dunfermline was the ancient seat of kings, and that the silver sands beach at Aberdour was one of the loveliest on the east coast. It is the sand on which I visualise Sir Patrick walking and worrying about his disastrous mission.

Because of this, I can’t choose Walter Scott’s version, which has Sir P’s ship founder forty miles off Aberdeen (though this is more likely, given the facts of history and geography). Anyway, the Spens family is a Fife family. Their descendants still live there and I met a lady on the train who told me (and I believed her) that she was married to a direct descendant of Sir Patrick Spens whose ship sank on the return journey to Aberdour.

There is so much more that could be said, including some comment on the versions with mermaids (I am very tempted by the mermaid but will resist). Walter de la Mare was right: where ballads are concerned, ‘the marvel is how much it tells by means of the little it says.’ And for this reason, and for the moment, I’ll end with a version of The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens that is somewhere between Percy and de la Mare. Whoever wrote it, wherever and whenever, it is a fact that when I reach the end, my eyes fill up.

The king sits in Dumferling toune,
…Drinking the blude-reid wine:
‘O whar will I get guid sailor,
…To sail this schip of mine?’

Up and spak an eldern knicht,
…Sat at the king’s richt kne;
‘Sir Patrick Spence is the best sailor,
…That sails upon the se.’

The king has written a braid letter,
…And signed it wi his hand
And sent it to Sir Patrick Spence,
…Was walking on the sand.

The first line that Sir Patrick red,
…A loud lauch lauched he;
The next line that Sir Patrick red,
…The teir blinded his ee.

‘O wha is this has don this deid,
…This ill deid don to me;
To send me out this time o’ the yeir,
…To sail upon the se!’

‘Mak haste, mak haste, my mirry men all,
…Our guid schip sails the morne.’
‘O say na sae, my master deir,
…For I feir a deadlie storme.’

‘Late late yestreen I saw the new moone
…Wi the auld moone in hir arme;
And I feir, I feir, my deir master,
…That we will cum to harme.’

O our Scots nobles wer richt laith
…To weet their cork-heild schoone
Bot lang owre a’ the play wer playd,
…Thair hats they swam aboone.

O lang, lang, may thair ladies sit
…Wi thair fans into their hand,
Or eir they se Sir Patrick Spence
…Cum sailing to the land.

O lang, lang, may the ladies stand
…Wi thair gold kems in their hair,
Waiting for thair ain deir lords,
…For they’ll se thame na mair.

Haf owre, haf owre to Aberdour,
…It’s fiftie fadom deip:
And thair lies guid Sir Patrick Spence,
…Wi the Scots lords at his feit.

THE ANSWER TO EVERYTHING

Reading. Why bother?

In my teens, watching University Challenge on TV, I howled at the idea of contestants from the University of Reading reading chemistry. Or philosophy. Or even English.

Reading strikes me as a good place to live for someone who enjoys reading. Such a person probably likes words too – their variations, their playfulness, their slipperiness. By ‘reading’, I mean the cognitive process of decoding symbols to derive meaning from text. But you knew that.

You probably also know about typoglycaemia (though perhaps not by that name) because of the jokey email or FaceBook postings that reveal how quickly and accurately we deduce meaning, even when words don’t look remotely like they’re supposed to. So another definition of ‘reading’ is: the way the eye moves rapidly to draw meaning from text. Very little is accurately ‘seen’ but you get it anyway.

Carl Spitzweg 'Der Bücherwurm' — Carl Spitzweg ‘Der Bücherwurm’

If you’re still with me, you’re doing it at this minute. Reading, I mean. You’ll be finding it more or less pleasant (physically) depending on how your browser displays this page. If the column appears too wide, with a long line for your eye to follow, reading will be harder. Typographers tell us that – for ease of making sense – the length of a line should be between 50-60 characters (that includes spaces). It will also help if the sentences aren’t too long, and if the words don’t have too many syllables (see Flesch-Kinkaid Readability Test).

(Actually the word ‘readability’ is reducing my readability, since it is polysyllabically rich, but not as polysyllabic as ‘polysyllabically’.)

But never mind. Reading is good for you. Reading is also good for me. That is to say if you read, it’s good for me. Because I sell books and pamphlets and – yes – I hope you will buy some of them and read them. Not, alas, Fiona Moore’s The Only Reason for Time, however, because although only published at the end of April, it has been selling like the proverbial hot cakes and we are down to the final copies.

In 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts in America did a survey about what they called ‘literary reading’. They called this Reading at Risk, which sums up their findings nicely. They discovered that – from young adulthood onwards – everybody was reading less (less ‘literature’, that is, though their definition of ‘literature’ was broad). The more education people had, the more they read, but all of them were reading significantly less than they used to.

I specially liked the way the NEAA survey suggested that people who did read literature were more likely to do other things too: they were more likely to do volunteer work, go to art galleries, concerts and films, and participate in and go to sporting events. The more you read, the richer your whole life. So forget the image of bookworms stuck at home with spectacles falling off the end of their noses.

Of course, I would like this, wouldn’t I? I sell bits of things to read and I believe reading is the answer to everything.

But I’m not alone. Here’s my favourite bit from the first volume of Stephen Fry’s autobiography, Moab is My Washpot. At this point in the book, Fry is at boarding school in Uppingham:

In my first year I had Fawcett as a friend, and later, a boy called Jo Wood, with whom I was to share a study in my second year. Jo Wood was sound, sound as a bell. Solid, cynical, amused and occasionally amusing, he did not appear to be very intelligent, and unlike Richard Fawcett and me, seemed uninterested in words, ideas and the world.

But one day he said to me: ‘I’ve got it now. It’s reading, isn’t it?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘You read a lot, don’t you? That’s where it all comes from. Reading. Yeah, reading.’

The next time I saw him he had a Herman Hesse novel in his hands. I never saw him again without a book somewhere on his person. When I heard, some years later, that he had got into Cambridge I thought to myself, I know how that happened. He decided one day to read.

THE SALINE COMMUNITY

In Merriam Webster it’s the seventh meaning. But it’s everywhere.

I refer to the definition of ‘community’ g : a body of persons of common and especially professional interests scattered through a larger society <the academic community>.

Frequently it’s the gay community. Or the deaf community. I am pleased to number myself a member of the left handed community. Naturally I feature in the female community, though this worries me somewhat, since I had thought this use of ‘community’ was inclined to define itself by exception, like the German Shepherd Dog community or the beard community.

It’s an odd word, ‘community’. Over-used and yet clinging desperately to its connotations of closeness, humanity and support.

Which brings me to last Friday and the ripples caused by Salt’s decision to cease (though not quite yet) publishing single author poetry collections. From The Guardian online we learn that this “hit online poetry community hard” (they probably meant the online poetry community).

I must be a member of the online poetry community, I guess. I interact a lot online and most of my interaction is about poetry. So I ought to be ‘hit hard’, though not half as hard as the Salt dispossessed poets community, one of which (Robert Peake) says as much in the Huffington Post.

But I’m also a member of the poetry publishing community – not that I would normally, as a junior member, have put it that way. Perhaps that’s why I don’t feel hit hard at all. Just particularly interested, especially in some of the thought-provoking comment the news has generated.

There’s Charles Boyle, for example, at sonofabook, with some context; Clare Pollard on ‘The Health of Poetry’; Matthew Stewart on Salt’s exit; Christie Williamson on Salt’s “ability to spark debate and comment”; Anthony Wilson on disappearing poets; and the remarkable Jon Stone on, among other aspects, poetry’s half-life.

I feel concern for the human beings involved in Salt’s decision, of course, concern for both publishers and publishees. But most of all I’m interested in the context. Things change all the time, most of them faster than ever before.

Poetry – whatever it may be – will survive. It doesn’t need business models. It thrives on opposition. It doesn’t need to be useful or justified. It’s a parasite. It will live off whatever opportunities present themselves, mercilessly and with ingenuity. And the individual parasite (among whose community I number myself) is important only to herself. As Stevie Smith said, “The poet is not an important fellow. There will always be another poet.”

WARMING THE COCKLES

Last week I wrote about idolatry. This week I learned it.

Driving to work, I quite often see someone singing at the wheel. If it’s a man, Nessun Dorma; a woman: I Will Survive.

In my case, I’m not singing (the mouth moves in a different way), I’m talking. I’m talking through a sonnet, line by line.

It can be dangerous. I think I have the whole sonnet safely heart-stowed, and then I acquire a snag round line 7 and I can’t bear it. The card with the sonnet is on the seat next to me. I could pick it up while driving, glance at it and ease my pain. Quite often I pull in: it’s safer.

Eventually I don’t have to stop because the poem is safe in head and heart, for a while at least.

Poet Ruth Pitter lost her sight in the last years of her life, but in her sightless nineties she could still recall swathes of poetry. I’ve always envied this. My mother, too, had a remarkable memory for the words of poems and songs. In my case, I have to work at it. I remember lines and snatches effortlessly, but the whole thing requires extended exercise.

But it is hugely satisfying. I have no idea why I’m not learning one all the time. Don Paterson famously says a poem is “a little machine for remembering itself”. He says this, I think, in more than one place but certainly in the introduction to his Faber book of 101 Sonnets. Why do I remember Paterson’s phrase? Because it’s so neat and so true of formal poems. The clicks and hinges, the tucking into place of phrase and cadence – these are all about meaning and memory.

I don’t think sound is everything in poetry, but it’s a great deal. Last week I believed I had examined #105, ‘Let not my love be called idolatry’ minutely. When I came to learn it by saying it over and over aloud, first I began to pay close attention to the repetitions. Because repetitions, in learning by heart, can both help and hinder. Obviously, in the idolatry sonnet ‘Fair, kind and true’ comes in three times, each time at the start of the line. Three words, three times.

The repetition I hadn’t fully clocked was ‘wondrous’ which comes in twice (‘still’ comes in twice too). Here’s the sonnet so you can see what I mean as I talk it through.

Let not my love be called idolatry,
Nor my beloved as an idol show,
Since all alike my songs and praises be
To one, of one, still such, and ever so.
Kind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind,
Still constant in a wondrous excellence;
Therefore my verse to constancy confined,
One thing expressing, leaves out difference.
Fair, kind, and true, is all my argument,
Fair, kind, and true, varying to other words;
And in this change is my invention spent,
Three themes in one, which wondrous scope affords.
Fair, kind, and true, have often lived alone,
Which three till now, never kept seat in one.

It’s only when you say the word ‘wondrous’ aloud (or only in my case) that you hear the ‘one’ inside it and therefore hear what the word is doing. You also hear the inner rhyme, like the Ariston and on and on advert: ‘Still constant in a wondrous excellence; / Therefore my verse to constancy confined, / One thing expressing’.

On and on. It’s in ‘invention’ too and ‘song’. It’s the last word of the whole poem: the high point. You, WS is saying, are The One. If this isn’t idolatry, what is? But in this poem, idolatry is dismissed as a matter of multiple idols, whereas true love is ‘three themes in one’. It’s another bit of blasphemous trickery – using the terms of ‘true religion’ to describe human love.

But Shakespeare doesn’t care. He’s creating a little machine for remembering itself, and it does. I thought at first the weak phrase was ‘varying to other words’. It doesn’t seem very memorable. It almost seems to cancel out the uniqueness of ‘Fair, kind and true’. If these are the only themes, why talk about varying them?

All Shakespeare’s sonnets have inner connections: often the logic and the syntax is as neat as the sound. Here ‘varying to other words’ connects directly to ‘And in this change’. I wondered (sorry about the pun) last week whether ‘change’ could have had a currency connection in Elizabethan England. I think it must have done. ‘And in this change’ must link back to ‘varying’ and link forward to ‘invention spent’, and further forward to the ‘wondrous scope’ that this ‘affords’. It may be that ‘scope’ shadow-rhyming with ‘Pope’ is going too far. Nevertheless, it forms another link in my memory chain.

Memorising is very odd. Certain lines and phrases are like safe havens or ‘barleys’ as we used to say at school (which may be a corruption of ‘parleys’). You arrive at them with relief: they ‘click’ more easily and resolutely than the rest. For me, it’s ‘Therefore my verse to constancy confined’. I love that phrase. I like the way ‘Therefore’ lodges neatly, and its logical link to ‘argument’. I savour the alliteration of ‘to constancy confined’ and the pun on ‘constancy’ as faithfulness but also simply Ariston and on and on.

And I adore ‘Which three, till now, never kept seat in one’. For some reason the ‘Which’ is particularly satisfying to me. Again, it’s a hinge, it points back nicely but it somehow helps to stack ‘three’ against ‘one’ at the other end of the line, while ‘never’ breaks the iambic pattern so thoroughly, so pleasurably, with such an irrevocable surge towards the resonant ONE at the end.

It is unforgivable to go on and on and on about one sonnet over two blog weeks. But learning it by heart changes everything. I still think the rehearsal of idolatry and Catholics and the Book of Common Prayer is interesting, but nothing compared to the hinges and clicks, the soundscape of the sonnet.

For example, why is it easy to remember line five? ‘Kind is my love today, tomorrow kind’? The word ‘Kind’ hasn’t featured in the first four lines. I think it’s because of ‘all alike my songs and praises be’, a lovely phrase in itself. The sound in ‘alike’ is picked up in ‘Kind’, and so it fits. It all fits.

Shakespeare is astonishing. It was when I began to memorise parts of plays at school that I realized something extraordinary was going on. It is still happening. So this week, I also memorized #30 ‘When to the sessions of sweet silent thought’. Much of that was on the train, so more difficult. However, there is a particular pleasure in bits of Shakespeare that have found their way to being famous in other context – in this case ‘remembrance of things past’.

And although I could write about #30 too from now till lunchtime, especially about the way the currency metaphor connects the entire sonnet from the (debtors’) court ‘sessions’ in line one to the ‘losses are restored’ in line 14, I’ll just note I was surprised that ‘moan’ in line 8 preceded ‘fore-bemoanèd moan’ in line 11. It occurred to me that I’d got the first ‘moan’ wrong. I thought it might have been ‘mourn th’expense of many a vanished sight’. (Shakespeare does use ‘mourn’: it’s in #71 ‘No longer mourn for me when I am dead’.)

But no, ‘moan’ is correct. And of course it is correct. Because the ‘fore-bemoanèd moan’ not only refers to past griefs, but also to the ‘moan’ earlier in the poem – and, even more importantly, a key word in the poem is ‘woe’. The most difficult line to say is: ‘And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste’, but it introduces the key sound ‘oh oh oh’, ‘old woes’. Hence the absolute necessity of ‘moan’, which will also echo in ‘flow’ and then another ‘woe’ and then ‘heavily from woe to woe tell o’er’. The whole poem is a symphony of lamentation, until the final couplet, which is suddenly (perhaps too suddenly) upbeat. The sonnet’s full of ‘w’ consonants too” when, woe, waste, weep, wail, drown, new, which, while, sorrow. Favourite haven phrases? ‘Love’s long since cancelled woe’.

This week I’m going to learn ‘My own heart let me more have pity on’. Gerard Manley Hopkins is harder than Shakespeare because the expression is so very compressed, but ‘thirst’s all-in-all in all a world of wet’ is not only irresistible, it’s suited to our current climate and it is now on a BardCard, just the right size for learning.

Please drive carefully.

IDOLATRY – OR BARDOLATRY?

This is what contemplation of one small poem leads you to.

Last week I put a set of smallish poems, mostly sonnets, onto cards (they can be found in the HappenStance shop). These cards are the right size for someone like me to carry round with them. I like to learn sonnets: I love the feeling of getting inside their size and shape and workings. In particular, I have lived much of my life (like many readers) with some of Shakespeare’s sonnets as close friends.

For the cards, I chose a couple by Shakespeare that I didn’t know so well. One of these was 105: ‘Let not my love be called idolatry’. And since I printed it and have kept it beside it me, it’s been going round and round in my head: the peculiar almost-rhyme between “Let not my” and “idolatry” has been working on me, for a start. But so have other things.

My students, in college, are studying the Scottish and English Reformation, the conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism in the Christian faith that led to many horrible deaths. And of course, in Shakespeare’s England, with a Protestant Queen, succeeded by a Protestant King, the Catholics were the underdogs. Criticism leveled at them could be amusing; it could also be a grave matter.

Shakespeare’s mother, Mary Arden, came from an openly Catholic family. And what did people say about Catholics in or around 1609 when the Sonnets were published? They were castigated, among other things, for their ceremonies, their vestments, their rituals: all this was ‘idolatry’. Praying to a little figure of the Virgin Mary was tantamount to heresy (from a Protestant point of view).

In the 1552 Prayer Book (which was not only familiar to most people in Shakespeare’s day whether or not they could read, but also the text I myself knew inside out in the 1960s, four hundred years later), there is a grim little service titled ‘A Comminacion Agaynste Synners’, to be chanted after the Litany, with responses from the assembled congregation.

The Litany is relevant here too, not just because the word ‘litany’ is commonly used today (and often by poets) but because the sense has been partly lost. Sitting through the litany in church was boring, but less boring than some services because at the end of each piece chanted by the officiating minister, you got to echo in the manner of a Greek chorus. The incantation of some of those rolling lines was pleasurable. For example:

Priest: O holy, blessed and glorious Trinitie, three persones and one God : have mercy upon us miserable synners.

Response: O holy, blessed, and glorious Trinitie, three persons and one God : have mercie upon us miserable synners.

You can see how powerful this rhetoric is, how enormously evocative, how the chanting (like the crowd chanting at a football match) can capture everyone into one common mind. And in a minute I’ll talk about the way it seeps into Shakespeare’s sonnet. But not yet.

First I want to return to that Comminacion or, in modern spelling, Commination. It is a fearsome word. It comes from the Latin ‘comminari’, to threaten with force (‘minatory’, meaning ‘threatening’, carries the same sense). But ‘commination’ is the force threatened by a god. In Christian terms, it was associated with divine threats against sinners, and in particular, their recital in front of a congregation (who joined in, as proof of their assent). Here’s a bit from the 1552 Book of Common Prayer:

CURSED is the man that maketh any carved or molten Image, an abhominacion to the Lorde, the worke of the handes of the craftes manne, and putteth it in a secrete place to worshyp it.

And the people shall aunswere and saye,
Amen.

In fact, both Catholics and Protestants were opposed to ‘idolatry’. It’s in the Bible: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” The issue between Catholics and Protestants, in this as in much else, was of interpretation.

And what did Shakespeare do with it all? He played with the idea: he bounced it through this sonnet as lightly as if nobody had ever died for their faith, as if martyrs were a thing of the past. And yet in 1570, when he was nearly six years old, a ruling from the Papacy excommunicated the English Queen (Elizabeth I) for her stubborn Protestantism and invited all Roman Catholics to rebel against her rule. A year later, Elizabeth brought in legislation making Roman Catholicism treasonable. If you were Roman Catholic, Jesuit or harboured a Catholic priest you could pay the standard price for treason, namely execution. How? A matter of being hanged, drawn and quartered.

Of course, if you were quietly Catholic and didn’t threaten any monarchs with political plotting, you were more or less okay. When James came to the English throne in 1603, things eased up a bit. But in 1606, Shakespeare’s fellow playwright Ben Johnson was summoned with his wife before the authorities because of their alleged failure to take communion in the Church of England. They were not executed. . . .

Back to my sonnet: Shakespeare worships his loved one, no question. He plays with the idea of idolatry and shrugs it off with a counter-gambit, also flirting with the concept of religious faith: “all like my songs and praises be, / To one, of one, still such, and ever so”. He has only one God, so it’s all right. But hey – his god is his loved-one. Not only that, he gives him three-in-one status: “Fair, kind and true, is all my argument, / Fair, kind and true, varying to other words”.

He goes further. Fair, kind and true, he says is “Three themes in one”, just like (in the 1552 Prayer Book quoted earlier) the “blessed and glorious Trinitie, three persones and one God”.

Shakespeare clearly doesn’t think he’s about to get hauled in for blasphemy. His wit, his confidence, his slant references – all indicate how safe he thinks he is. But he plays with the fire of the times, no doubt. His concluding couplet talks about his beloved as if he is something dramatically elevated and – yes – godlike:

Fair, kind, and true have often lived alone,
Which three, till now, never kept seat in one.

I like many things about this sonnet. I had never thought of it before as courting controversy – but now I see it does that too. What most appealed to me was the odd plainness. The three high praises are in monosyllabic adjectives: fair, kind, true. These are not in themselves particularly interesting words, though the vowel change between them is attractive. When he repeats the trilogy (three times), he repeats the words in the same order, so a sense of liturgical chanting starts to gather force. The increasingly familiar vowels ring out in the same order, each ending on ‘true’ (with its shadow-rhyme of ‘you’ perhaps). “In this change is my invention spent”, he says as the vowels ring out from one to the next, one to the next.

And the sonnet ends on “one”, which echoes “constant” and “constancy” and “wondrous”, as well as its near-rhyme “alone”. And the last line goes back to the negative of the first but it’s a positive negative: “Which three, till now, never kept seat in one”. Feel the oomph on the “never”, the only word with two syllables in a run of simple monosyllables, and its distant pairing with the earlier “ever so”.

Helen Vendler, in The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, says Shakespeare was also invoking “the Platonic Triad (the Beautiful, the Good, the True}” and deliberately opposing it to the Christian Trinity. I hadn’t thought of Plato, but yes.

And the mind goes on working on these 14 lines, this little card, on the idea that his invention is all “spent” on those three words but this “affords” great scope – juggling with financial imagery too. Did people give “change” in cash terms in Elizabethan England? I don’t know. There were no banknotes, only coins, so our concept of ‘change’ as coinage or loose change can’t have existed then. At least I don’t think so. I must stop thinking about this. I haven’t even learned the sonnet by heart yet.

I am, however, clearly guilty of bardolatry, as identified by George Bernard Shaw. But I don’t care.

Special offer: for anyone ordering a pack of the new BardCards from the shop, I’ll throw in an extra Shakespeare (on idolatry). That person would have to be something of a bardolater themselves to have read to the end of this long blog.

Can you write a good poem FAST?

‘Your car is never parked,’ my loved-one is fond of saying. ‘It’s merely abandoned.’

Whether or not his observation is justified, he’s unaware that his words bring another matter to mind (apart from revenge).

What he reminds me of is this: ‘Un poème n’est jamais fini, seulement abandonné. A poem is never finished, only abandoned.’ The words are Paul Valéry’s, though I first came across them elsewhere – quoted by Philip Larkin, I think.

Where parking is concerned, I don’t care much, though I want to make it clear I never cross the white line or make direct contact with another vehicle. With poetry, it’s another matter.

During the HappenStance submissions month, it’s not uncommon to receive a set of poems ‘all written in the last six months’. It is never a good idea to tell me this. I am more inclined to think good poetry was written ages ago. Gerry Cambridge, editor of The Dark Horse, once told me in no uncertain terms: ‘Do not send out fresh poems’. In my case, he was right. Time and time again, I am sure a poem is ‘finished’, only to find out three months (or three years) later I was horribly wrong.

Often, I find myself scribbling on someone else’s work: ‘I don’t think this is fully cooked.’ Isn’t a poem closer to a biscuit than a cake? – first baked, then dried out in a slow oven?

It depends. There are circumstances in which poems arrive fast and finished. Re-reading some of Gerard Manley Hopkin’s darkest sonnets, and in particular ‘ I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day’, I see James Reeves’ note at the back of my edition: ‘This and the three following sonnets are probably among those referred to in a letter to Bridges in which Hopkins says, Four of these came like inspirations unbidden and against my will.’ That sounds fast to me, although the final sonnets may be some way from their original manifestations.

I am fond of quoting the late Anna Adams on this. Island Chapters (1991) records the experiences of the poet and her painter husband (the book is beautifully illustrated with colour plates of paintings) on the remote Hebridean island of Scarp. Here she is:

There is a game that one person can play with the sea. I invented it. There is really only one rule, and that is very simple. The water should be fairly rough, and the tide rising. The player sits down on the shore line like King Canute, using a boulder for a throne, and must not move until he does so without making any conscious decision about it. He (or she) may rise and run only when to do so is an inevitable and involuntary act.

Perhaps poems should be written in these conditions – only when they are inevitable. Much ink might be saved, and every poem would have the necessary ingredient of desperation in it. It would be something found, not something sought. True poems come into being at the top of an experience chain, as people and birds of prey are at the top of the food chain. But some links of the experience chain may be the writing of manufactured poems, or a poem hunt, and the dark night of the doggerel. Rubbish-writing and despair. It is necessary to work, providing one’s own waves of energy, until, suddenly, the poem is given. It may be a line or a word only, but it slots into place like a keystone, locking words together.

So there is a case for poems written fast, hurriedly, uncooked. They may be the necessary experiences in a chain.

James Reeves would not have agreed. He thought the hardest (but most important) thing for a poet was to know when not to write. In ‘What is it to be a poet?’ (in Commitment to Poetry, 1969), he says: ‘It is up to every poet to know his creative power, and not force it. I know mine to be small and I say this without complacency. I never cease to wish it were greater.’ And he goes on ‘One must accept the gift one has; one must accept the necessity for silence, for doing nothing; it is the hardest thing to be a poet and be unable to write poems.’

Perhaps one role of the editor or publisher is to help identify the work at the end of the chain: to suggest that not all the poems – which may at times seem inevitable – have fully ‘arrived’ – though the experience of writing them may prove invaluable. Sometimes writing nothing is an excellent idea. Sometimes reading is the richest road.

Fast or slow, it’s hard to see a poem properly when you’re close to it. They need a little time and emotional distance. Although fresh rolls are the only rolls worth eating, this analogy doesn’t work for la poésie. The incorrigible Cambridge was correct: do not send out fresh poems. Put them in a drawer. Read them again when you can read them like a reader, not a poet. Then see how the little bastards shape up.